Domination of the public street space :: Today’s blog

It’s very rude to mention oneself, and so even if it’s some kind of pre-test it seems necessary at least the brevity: We talked here last week about some aspects of a shared space and how it was perceived by users, often as a no-man’s-land to be set aside for your own business if No other regulator or competitor intervened. It started from the simple common space of the communal private balcony which turns from one facing path to another according to the views of the users (born in the semi-feudal era in the peasant houses of the indisputable ownership of the owner and workers), to the transition to the portico that empties a piece of the building filled with participants who The street supports them. And now we come logically to the same road that stopped at the edge of the first reversal. The edges of the road are something very tangible but at the same time indeterminate: no man’s land like the original balcony, a kind of mixture of flows and stagnation that is not permanently guarded by anything, about which everyone claims. The last photo attached to a blog last week depicted just one of these confusing claims: a fruit cart occupying a bandit behind a grocery store curb. What does it mean and what intentions revealed?

It is not immediate to conclude, not even for those who have thought about the whole urban porch thing. He opens a lively nostalgia-type grocery store, hoping for what is now called gentrification and begins to run it in ways that are in keeping with that spirit recounted by the press in somewhat rumored but market-oriented terms: goods are stacked inside and outside in peasant style. -Popular, price tags are written on rough paper, wooden boxes and things like that. Appreciatively occupying a not-too-narrow part of the sidewalk at the end is part of the linguistic quote: the crates of tomatoes and oranges that protrude from the facade, which no sane person would ever dream of buying by correctly imagining the layers of car pollution, are a kind of signature and a real guarantee Which attracts housewives of all kinds and generations. The wooden hawker’s cart of the time set on the sidewalk in the strip usually occupied by parked cars is an extension of the default sign itself, and was probably also decorated with inedible greenery. But then that buggy disappears at a certain time of the day and another side of the matter appears.

The biologically enhanced merchant is also a human being, and as a human he tends to be a motorist: that wagon we envisioned as a strategy for the commercial privatization of the public space of the road miraculously transforms itself into something else. In other words, in the biologically-improved version of the otherwise invisible bins of rubble that many other ordinary merchants place in front of their store to illegally occupy one or more places, to then be used to park their cars, and supplier carts (when the classic double row is impractical ) or cars of regular customers. Moreover, even the organized or illegal occupation of the tables of some columns, which has undergone a major upsurge with the epidemic, belongs to the same family of “borderline” struggle over public spaces that we insist not perceive as such at all.

Except that since it stigmatized cars in the twentieth century, the struggle is no longer about one user against another, but rather about organized interest groups, public administration, political discretion, and respected economic lobbies. However, it is always sufficient to clarify the boundary between what must remain shareable in space-time, to stop the flows of other activities, and what is owner-owner without any excuse for exploitation, having been overcome by ordinary methods of economic transactions. . After all, modern urban planning was born exactly from there, and was written by the same architect of the United States Constitution, the “We the People” constitution, which traces the Manhattan Plan of 1811 still in effect today, and which says in essence: This is where the The private (the building) arrives and from here the public (the street) begins. The rest are ideological lies that basically went out of business. word d.

Al-Fateh City – Public Places